UK Plans for Three-Hour Power Blackouts in Event of Gas Shortages | Hacker News Reader

UK Plans for Three-Hour Power Blackouts in Event of Gas Shortages

news.sky.com

169 pointsbelter157 comments

I recently built a small home solar battery system with the goal of keeping my low-power DC devices charged and running during outages like this. I've only been running it for a few months now, but I've been using it to keep all of my USB devices charged during that time.

In an actual power outage, I can even plug in my modem, router, and AP—using DC barrel jacks for the modem and router and a DIY PoE injector for the AP—so as long as the upstream infrastructure is still powered I'll be able to keep working.

Since I rent, I can't do a roof-mount or grid-tie system, so I opted instead to build a 12V DC system. I purchased a used solar panel and I've assembled a ~0.5kWh battery from used packs.

I'm using insulated nickel strips to pass the solar panel cables through a closed closed window in a way that doesn't require drilling holes and has a minimum impact on the insulation seal of the window (although insulation in the UK really sucks anyway).

Most of the fittings and wiring have been used and come mostly from automotive scrap (an advantage of using common 12/24V standard fittings), so the financial cost has been very low. That said collecting use battery packs, testing cells, and assembling them into new battery packs certainly takes time.

Might be a good time to look into home battery systems. Regular 3 hour blackouts are exactly the sort of situation where they shine. It's even possible to build DIY systems out of rack batteries and generic charge controllers, although you will need permits and probably professional install to hook it to your home electrical panel.

I installed a backup system (in the greenhouse rather than the house... priorities) to cope with these kinds of problems.

Using a Victron Multiplus 1.6kVA system with 2x 110Ah 12V Gel batteries was remarkably cheap and simple. The whole lot came to just over €1k and took ~1h to set up, mostly setting jumper switches.

It keeps the pellet boiler, circulation pumps, backup gas heaters and control gear going all night when necessary. The automatic switchover from mains (<20ms) is so fast that none of the PLCs, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis or heating equipment notices. Upgrading its capacity simply involves plugging in another 2x batteries (it's a 24v unit) in parallel.

The only thing I wasn't thrilled about was that it doesn't protect against power surges, and a storm fried the boiler logic board AND the gas valve in the backup heater simultaneously in midwinter. (Victron unit was fine though!) Lesson learned.

A similar installation in the house could easily power our (non-electric) central heating system, LED lighting and wifi for plenty long enough to stay civilized, and we're being prepared for 2 hour rolling blackouts here this winter.

Word of warning: Just like solar inverters, not every home battery system is made to be grid independent. For instance, the Tesla Powerwall does, but the Sessy home battery does not and needs an active AC sinus on the grid.

Even if you do have a home battery system that can generate its own sinusoidal AC wave, you still need an (automatic) transfer switch to disconnect your home from the failed grid, otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work.

> otherwise your home battery might be attempting to power the entire (local) grid which of course doesn't work.

and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is.

Line workers are trained to never assume a line is de-energized, those that forget don't live very long.

(But yes, backfeeding the grid during an outage is dangerous and highly against code.)

> and some random line worker may think there's no electricity flowing when there is.

If you have lines in an unknown state, step 1 is to put them in a known state. For power line work, this involves grounding all the phases and neutral together at both ends of the section you intend to work on. Good luck ringing a dead short with your home inverter/generator/etc.

Off topic but I've always thought of grounding as conceptually making the entire earth a part of the circuit and so dispersing the energy over a very large area.

Is that conceptualisation correct?

What happens is you have say a conductive (iron rich) top layer. Is there still the potential to dangerously energise the ground? I assume so because that's basically what water and electricity does?

Grounding isn't really about dispersing energy over an area, it's about creating a situation where faults can be detected and circuits automatically opened to prevent shocks or fires. It actually gets very involved to reason through the exact purpose of ground connections when you start considering all the different types and combinations of faults (indoors, outdoors, person in contact with true earth, person touching exposed metal pipe, etc etc).

Not an electrician, so someone else may have better info.

Grounding provides an alternate path for the flow of electricity, so if a wire comes loose and ends up touching a copper pipe or something the current gets routed into the ground rather than into pipes or flammable wood or something.

Dispersal over an area isn't directly the goal, but it helps. By dispersing the current into an extremely large object, you don't really have to worry about the object building up a charge to the point where you can't flow current into it anymore.

Yes, you can dangerously energize the ground. You can dangerously energize almost anything with enough voltage. E.g. a Tesla coil has enough voltage to conduct through air. Don't try to test it (obviously), but I don't think a standard 110V house grounding has enough voltage to dangerously energize ground over any significant distance.

What's the point of a home battery system that doesn't work when the grid is down? What else would you use the battery for?

For homes, you store solar in it and discharge at night to reduce bills. For commercial, you do peak shaving and load shifting to reduce bills. Also, you can sell your battery capacity to some companies and they can aggregate it with other homes in your area to sell the capacity to the grid during peaks, to eek out a bit more value.

What else would you use the battery for?

Efficiency.

You can store excess energy from local microgeneration, particularly solar, that can be used later. With our current pricing model in the UK, that is several times cheaper than selling the excess power to the grid for a token return and then paying full price to have the same amount back from your mains supply later.

Some systems can even be configured to charge their battery from the mains at quiet times (when, again in a typical UK pricing model, the cost-per-unit can be much lower) if there isn’t enough local generation to fully charge it, for example in the middle of winter.

A home battery system stores the excess solar energy generated during the day so you can use it at night. It's about long term savings on electricity bills.

It can be useful in cases where you have Time of Use metering. You can charge your battery in the middle of the day when energy is cheap due to solar overproduction and then draw down the battery in the evening when power is expensive. If you have it tied to solar panels you can even charge the battery with solar and then sell it back to the grid in the evening. In a few places you can even do "peak shaving" where the power company will give you a pretty nice bonus for switching your battery into grid-feed mode when the demand is so high that they are considering turning on expensive peaker plants.

Most people unfortunately can't take advantage of this, but most battery packs are also suitable for off-grid use.

Not even just time-of-use metering. If you lack net metering (e.g. you can't use the grid as a battery) then using a battery when your solar is not producing (enough) reduces your overall consumption.

Arbitrage - especially given that it is a value that is guaranteed to have differences on a day cycle.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utility-scale-battery-stora...

https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/two-ways-to-use-grid-tied-...

Things like https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/products-and-services/custo... note the https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/products-and-services/custo... - the CGS Plus and Smart Export involve use of a battery that isn't necessarily home power sufficient.

> not every home battery system is made to be grid independent.

In Europe you should check if grid-independence is even legal. In some places it is not.

It's legal, they just won't pay you subsidies for solar panels.

If and how panels are incentivized varies from country to country.

I've always wondered, what if you were to wire up a panel and one light to the grid, but the then rest of the house is on a separate independent circuit? Technically the house is on-grid...

You could get caught if ever there's a fire, or you need an electrician and you forget to undo that before the electrician gets there, or if there's some sort of code inspection.

I don't think it's that simple. These circuits are already a thing in the form of solar powered security lights, and shed lighting kits.

I suspect the dividing line is voltage? >50v systems in cars are treated differently, so maybe the same for houses, you probably don't need that much for lighting anyway.

This is one of those laws that you should want to break. I’d rather have energy independence than follow rules.

My family live in a rural area. For a while, we had an unusually high frequency of power cuts around here. If I understood correctly, it was something to do with recurring problems with the overhead lines supplying local substation(s). Mostly it was just a few seconds or maybe a few minutes, enough to reset equipment and cause some irritating disruption but not catastrophic. Occasionally, though, the supply did cut out for a much longer time and you had to start thinking about whether you really needed to open the fridge/freezer right now.

Between that experience and the environmental benefits, we were already discussing installing a big solar panel and battery system at our home with local suppliers, even before the recent dramatic price rises and the bizarre news that in the 21st century there’s a credible threat of rolling blackouts here.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that getting such a system professionally installed and commissioned is likely to be a long wait and then cost a small fortune. Systems that can keep the household power on when the mains supply cuts out can require jumping through extra regulatory and consent hoops before anyone installs the new gear alongside a mains supply. You’ll also have fewer and often much more expensive options for the hardware than systems designed for efficiency/environmental benefits but not resilience to outages.

Of course it might still be a very good idea to do this, if you’re lucky enough to meet the practical requirements and have the money to do it. But it’s definitely not going to be some DIY system you can build for £1,000. More like £10,000–20,000 and several months of waiting for an installation date, at least in this area.

Very true. An alternative is to install a lower-spec off-the-shelf charger/inverter for closer to £1k though, and instead have a handful of sockets with backup power. Being able to charge your phone and laptop, keep the fridge/freezer running and have at least some light is still magical.

Anything like that is better than nothing, for sure. Personally, we already have various critical equipment on UPS.

Having to work out what is protected and for how long gets old pretty quickly, though. So do alarms going off in one room or another if the mains supply cuts out in the middle of the night, when everyone is (was) probably sleeping anyway. Or occasionally annoyances like waking up to find a big job scheduled to run overnight hasn’t actually run because the system that should have run it executed a controlled power-down after an earlier power outage instead.

In contrast, a relatively large but domestic-scale battery system can easily store 10kWh or more of usable energy these days and provide it to anywhere in the building. That’s enough to run most of our house for 24h, as long as we avoid using very high consumption devices for extended periods or running too many of them at once with peak consumption levels higher than the equipment supports — a huge upgrade compared to the small-scale alternatives.

I used to trigger my fuses in my apartment a lot, so I got a UPS power strip. I connected it to my router so the internet would stay on in case I was on a work call or something.

Maybe that’s the simplest solution. Every important appliance has its own UPS. Small UPS’s like that require no setup or permits and just kinda work.

I wonder if you could use one to power a fridge..

As fridges increasingly become inverter-drive (ie: continuous drive), it’s my dream that one day they’ll have a 48VDC port and anyone can setup a PV on them, no permit required. Or bypass their inverter from their battery bank (before the fridge rectifies it and inverts it again).

It’ll use solar when available and grid for the rest.

Since it’s inverter drive, it can use whatever amperage comes in, even if it means running a 5% duty cycle and do at least something. The contents are the battery!

They might use a switching power supply on the rectifier side, which works anywhere from 100 to 240V.

Imagine the size of the opportunity here for green energy companies. Everybody whose ever wanted to pitch high efficiency building supplies or solar panels is finally going to get peoples attention. This could be huge over the next 10 years

Solar panels already had a waiting list. Waiting list is a lot longer and installation is more expensive now.

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of the blackout? The point is to force people to use less electricity. All you're doing is cheating the system by stockpiling it before the cutoff.

Bear in mind that if you plan to recharge from the grid when the power is on, that's just going to exacerbate the problem of gas shortages.

In California or Texas you could recharge with solar, but in Europe, solar during winter is basically useless. I'm at 54N and in June my system generates 1400kWh, in December if I get 90kWh I'll be lucky.

If you want to know the result of successive Tory governments and forty years of deregulation and mismanagement, then power blackouts and people not being able to heat their homes is it. The Tory agenda now seems fixed upon ensuring the very rich have everything and everyone else has absolutely nothing.

Maybe just maybe the UK as learnt the lesson?

I highly doubt it. Any lessons will be shortlived, and probably will be forgotten by the electorate before the next election

> The Tory agenda now seems fixed upon ensuring the very rich have everything and everyone else has absolutely nothing.

It has always been thus.

Before the riches of globalisation somewhat masked the damage.

The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size and we are doing much better than the UK. Jobs are plentiful and our corporate titans continue to dominate global equities.

Maybe the issue in the UK isn’t as simple as tax rates. But you can always try to pivot hard left, maybe it will work this time. Capital does tend to flee when serious attempts to expropriate it occur…

> The US is the most deregulated, pro-market, capitalist developed nation of size

Well, here in the US, I still buy electricity from the government. Consumer energy deregulation in the UK started in the late 80s and electricity has been sold through private companies for years.

It's not so much energy deregulation that's the problem, more the fact that we gave away the resources of oil and gas for peanuts and now pay through the nose for them, compared to say Norway or Saudi Arabia where they oil and gas stayed as a semi-state-owned resource.

Both Texas and California struggle to keep the power on. They both make memes about it, too.

Correct. The UK doesn’t have a large domestic market or much in the way of resources. The US has both.

There are lots of jobs in the UK right now - in fact there is a labor shortage.

What we don't have is large domestic natural resources, or access to the global market guaranteed by force of arms. We used to have that, but we had to give it up due to the Second World War and also morality (admittedly that part came with hindsight and without prerequisite contrition and apologies).

Sacrificing public health systems and educational programs in order to enforce the largest military empire in human history might also have something to do with it.

Europe on the other hand spent their money on populist programs that kept their leftist politicians elected - and now it’s once again counting on good old USA’s help to keep the invading hordes at bay.

The problem Europe has isn't regulation, it's that it doesn't have the continent-scale easily-accessed shale oil the US has. Also that it shares a border with Russia. These problems are geographic, not something a government can change.

Are you sure that this has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine?

If it is down to the Tories then they have really screwed up the EU as well!

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/energy-...

The thing is that Britain has an independent oil and gas sector though. We're not reliant on imports, so yeah, the blame can be levelled at the Tories for this one.

That oil and gas sector is still reliant on international gas prices, since it's a global market. I'm not sure if it's even possible for a single country to commandeer its fossil fuel production for own use without sparking a few international conflicts.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-118

> With U.S. crude oil production nearly doubling from 2009 to 2015, Congress repealed the crude oil export ban in December 2015—allowing the free export of U.S. crude oil worldwide.

https://ballotpedia.org/Crude_oil_export_ban

Yep, a country can do it and has done it.

You're not reliant on imports, but unless you outlaw the export of energy you're still subject to the global price of energy. If they can export it cheap enough, energy producers would rather sell it to mainland Europe or around the world rather than sell it for less domestically.

Most of the oil and gas from the North sea is exported, at the same time the Tories suggest more fracking as if extra oil and gas wouldn't also be sold.

Britain is at much higher risk because unlike Germany and several other countries on the continent it has virtually no gas storage capacity. Here in Germany we have at least two full months of reserves. Despite Britain's size it has only 1% of the storage capacity that the continent has, even the Dutch storage capacity is nine times higher. One of the reasons? Britain closed one of its largest domestic storage facilities in 2017 for budget reasons. (750 million over ten years)

Obviously the war plays an important role but Tory economic philosophy is well at work here as well, just like in any other public sector.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...

The reason for this though is that we do have a marine gas terminal infrastructure... unlike Germany.

The UK also has large percentage of Europe's LNG ports. The "storage" is in the form of LNG tankers constantly docking and unloading here.

I agree with the sentiment but its a bit misplaced here. The energy industry in the UK is still heavily regulated and the government do intervene a lot. The main thrust of this has been to push renewables and nuclear to combat climate change. And the response of National Grid has been to plan for that. For example in planning connections for offshore wind, building interconnectors and incentivising backup capacity. They have a good record in maintaining supply and are well funded.

The trouble is that much of our backup depended on gas and interconnectors. Gas has been effected by the war. The interconnector capacity by French nuclear problems. Those nuclear problems have exasperated gas supply problems.

There are steps the government could have taken. In hindsight maybe we should have kept more coal stations available. And gas storage should have been maintained. And we definitely should have built out more onshore wind. But I don't think the system is mismanaged. And we are probably better placed than much of mainland Europe for this winter. We did build some massive offshore windfarms.

We (the Tories) also privatised North sea oil and gas, giving it away for peanuts, and that chicken has now come home to roost.

Our biggest problem is that we are not rich enough and I absolutely agree that the Tory party hold a lot of responsibility for that. Poor choices on oil and gas are a part of that.

> then power blackouts and people not being able to heat their homes is it

You forgot food banks, people having to choose in between heating and food, and poverty suicides. Also, clowns - psychopathic clowns. Lots of them...

How convenient that every problem is the fault of your political opponents.

Two months ago:

https://youtu.be/q-88_6K3KAQ?t=55

https://youtu.be/h2RbupviJMM?t=59

This appears to be a contingency plan 'in the "unlikely" event supplies of gas fall short of demand.'

The report showed, under a base case scenario, that margins between peak demand and power supply were expected to be sufficient and similar to recent years thanks to secure North Sea gas supplies, imports via Norway and by ship.

Any operator that didn't have such contingency plans would be negligent.

Is it going to happen in reality: hopefully not

Edit: I have a feeling that the article may be referring to the 3 hour Loss of Load Expectation (LOLE) service level target for the year.

This isn't quite the same as a three hour blackout.

I'm not sure though because the sky article doesn't reference its sources.

Which may be this:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/264521/download

or it might not?

edit2:

actually I think it's this:

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/268346/download

edit3:

Found it, its not the LOLE target, but the response to scenario 2 on page 10 of the second link:

scenario 1: "In this scenario we assume that we have no electricity interconnector imports from France, Belgium and the Netherlands (these are assumed to provide a de-rated capacity of 3.9GW in the Base Case). It is assumed that we import 1.2GW from Norway and export 0.4GW to Northern Ireland and Ireland."

scenario 2: "In this scenario we assume the same assumptions as Scenario 1, but with an additional 10GW CCGTs unavailable for a two-week period in January1. These assumptions have been chosen to illustrate the potential impact on the electricity system if there was insufficient gas supply in Great Britain."

"Should this scenario happen, it may be necessary to initiate the planned, controlled and temporary rota load shedding scheme under the Electricity Supply Emergency Code (ESEC). In the unlikely event we were in this situation, it would mean that some customers could be without power for pre-defined periods during a day – generally this is assumed to be for 3 hour blocks. This would be necessary to ensure the overall security and integrity of the electricity system across Great Britain. All possible mitigating strategies would be deployed to minimise the disruption."

Which I think would then follow this set of rules:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

final: I think my information here is mostly right. But you should not base your electricity operational decisions on it!

Under Designated Services:

> Sites with a continuous manufacturing process, not sustainable through BEIS standby generation, where regular shutdown for 3-hour periods is not possible and would cause significant financial damage

I wonder if this includes Agile offices, it seems like a broad definition!

That is not a manufacturing process. Pretty sure they are referring to time sensitive operations where halting a manufacturing process causes substantial losses due to the overhead of starting and stopping that process and probably losses due to waste that cut much deeper than mere losses in profits... maybe also to do with the affect on supply consistency to their customers.

(Regularly) shutting down such operations could quite realistically bankrupt them.

:-)

Very broad indeed, though I think it's just qualification for asking, not grounds for acceptance, (thankfully)

One thing I'm curious to know is what it's like on the distribution side though, getting these requests and then approving them (or not)

I wonder if they only get serious requests (say steel mills and hospitals) or if they also get requests from non-essential businesses who shouldn't be on the list?

Most data centers should have back up power, so the question of whether Facebook, Twitter and Amazon get cut off probably doesn't need to be asked.

Datacenters often have agreements to shed load in emergencies - I was working on a machine inside a datacenter in San Diego when they announced that SDGE had asked them to throw to generator as the load was too high. This was back in the Enron days.

If you've never been in a secure datacenter when they throw, it's fun.

  > If you've never been in a secure datacenter when they throw, it's fun.

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Seriously, though, do tell us more.

if you're into datacenter drama you may find this interesting. It's a livejournal of a datacenter in downtown New Orleans riding out Hurricane Katrina and all the crazyness they went through to keep things online in the aftermath. Comes complete with snipers, rolling barrels of fuel up parking garages, raiding snack machines, the whole enchilada.

https://interdictor.livejournal.com/2005/08/29/

(In)famously, they were SomethingAwful's hosts (you can see a reference to this on one of the Sep 1 posts)

So the one I was in had these massive rooms full of lead-acid batteries, and 3 or 4 multi-megawatt "generators" outside (located at various sides of the building, not all in one place).

They announced it over the PA because it was a planned transfer - and then all the "normal" lighting went off (think overhead fluorescents) at the same time the emergency lighting came on - the power to the servers and anything plugged into the racks didn't even flicker, of course.

There was a huge thunking sound from somewhere (I assume something disconnecting from grid power) and the muted roar of the generators starting. A few moments later, the main lights came back on.

It was an entirely different experience than a normal power failure, where everything goes quiet - you knew something happened, but other than that it all worked smoothly.

From what I can recall, the UK government's plans and predictions have consistently been... over-optimistic.

Time to go to the local charity shop and buy some wool sweaters.

Unfortunately the government (of all stripes) tends to reject predictions it doesn't like:

try this one from 20 years ago:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3034088.stm

(it's on this topic of energy)

It’s interesting sometimes to see how far we’ve come, despite all the immediate doom and gloom. The mix of UK energy supplies from that 2003 article was reportedly:

    Gas     38%
    Coal    32%
    Nuclear 23%
    Oil      4%
    Others   3%

Compare that to the use of renewables and the reduced dependency on fossil fuels today and at least we’ve taken some big steps in the right direction since then.

There isn’t much to like about the current situation, but it does mean the danger of relying on supplies of non-renewable fuels has been shown beyond any doubt. If we do experience one of the bad scenarios with rolling power cuts this winter, it must be near-certain that whoever forms the government for the rest of the 2020s will get elected on a very green platform. If important steps towards making us both more resilient and more environmentally friendly then get taken sooner, that’s one small victory at least.

Some of this is going to end up depending on the wind. The chart on page 13 of your second link shows 16.1% wind of every single day for the period. So that's about 4GW, day after day. That's a placeholder, because we have no sufficiently accurate long range forecast. The reality, hour by hour could be 15GW and it could be 1GW.

Yes definitely agree.

Overall the UK grid is probably too dependent on wind energy, with all the variability that involves.

Right now gridwatch.org.uk is showing about 13.5GW from wind (40% of demand), but I've seen some days when there has been well under 1GW.

Probably. The trouble is that we're committed to net zero, and there isn't much of an alternative to relying on wind energy this far north unless you have better sites for hydroelectric than the UK or can make nuclear work somehow. The UK does at least have a decent amount of offshore wind which is a little less intermittent than the onshore variety.

We're not yet in a place where we routinely make so much wind power that we need less rather than more.

We need a lot more storage, even battery storage plus wind is way cheaper than current gas shortage induced prices, and both wind turbines and batteries are getting cheaper

If you have lived in a country with load-shedding and have experienced this before, as far as your average household goes, 3 hours without power is barely an inconvenience. If the winters are harsh though, probably not as easy.

Or, if you live in California. 3 hours is nothing! A while ago, we went for a week without power in the northern part of the state.

Why?

California's energy policy needs a little work. Their environmental laws made creating power plants impossible in their state, so they almost exclusively purchase power from other states at sub-optimal rates for any new power demand.

Edit: phrasing and tone

In 2021, California produced about 200 TWh in-state and imported about 85 TWh, meaning they imported about 30% of total electricity. Not exactly "almost exclusively" imports.

Also, California regulations certainly permit building new power plants (and many new plants have been built in the past decade), just not new coal fired plants.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

> just not new coal fired plants.

Or hydro-electric, or nuclear, or anything that would have meaningful impact on the state's situation.

More solar and wind are great, but they do not respond well to surges in demand, and there is no current way to store energy either.

So some impressive total production number might sound great, but the reality does not follow unfortunately. For a non-trivial portion of the state, electricity isn't a guarantee throughout the year anymore.

When I lived in LA it was frustrating explaining (to my out of state friends) how bad the power situation was. I cancelled many a DnD game because of it.

I eventually got so sick of it , that I left the state for good. I've never been happier.

If you chew through the numbers you just posted, you will find that imports from out of state are increasing year over year.

Hence, my statement "they almost exclusively purchase power from other states at sub-optimal rates for any new power demand"

PG&E, our regulated monopoly electrical utility, turns the power off during hot, windy days during the summer so that they can avoid liability for starting wildfires. They never maintained their equipment, so it fails and starts massive fires.

Fascinating

That's nothing.

You want to learn what to do during winter power outages?

Join us down in Houston! Or anywhere in Texas for that matter.

I lived in California for 30 years and the only time I remember any serious issues with power was back in 2000-2001 during the famous electricity crisis. But for some reason this idea endures that California has problems with their grid. Do they really? Because other than that one acute crisis I didn't have a problem with blackouts (that I can remember) for 20 freaking years. That's a pretty good record. It's a big state, so maybe the Bay Area has just fared better than other regions?

It's been getting worse lately. The average amount of time each residential PG&E customer was without power due to a sustained outage has increased from 1.9 hours/year in 2016 to 3.6 hours/year in 2021.

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/outages/planning-and-p...

PG&E started voluntarily turning off power to entire towns to avoid fire hazards... fire hazards that were self-made and exist only because of other failures that have piled up for the past few decades.

So the current situation is something along the lines of when the wind blows too much, they shut off the grid. When it blows too little, they shut off the grid. When it gets too hot, they shut off the grid.

It's crazy that this is happening in California of all places, but decades of poor policy decisions led to this and it'll take quite a bit of time to undo.

I used to live half a mile from a power plant in another state and I had far more outages there than I've had in California. That said, there are constant incentives to reduce peak energy usage, and there were a couple weeks this year where they almost did rolling blackouts. So, they still struggle with meeting demand sometimes.

Stanford had a big power outage recently (this summer) that took out student accommodation, server rooms, etc... due to wild fires.

> If you have lived in a country with load-shedding and have experienced this before, as far as your average household goes, 3 hours without power is barely an inconvenience.

I live in the US (TX) where load shedding is rare, but I did lose power from roughly 11:30a yesterday until ~11:30 today due to a snafu with the power company. Discovered this just prior to my 12pm Zoom meeting.

Three hours while I sleep matters not. Three hours when I need my wifi for work is quite annoying.

A more robust energy supply should be the goal, but better failure modes would also be of value.

Texas is disconnected from the national power grid even though it would help.

"According to an analysis by the American Council on Renewable Energy, each additional gigawatt of transmission capacity connecting the Texas power grid with neighboring states could have saved nearly $1 billion and prevented blackouts in around 200,000 Texas homes during Winter Storm Uri last year."

"House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that the state’s denizens would prefer a prolonged blackout over federal regulators requiring changes to the system. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/14/texas-national-power...

It seems like Texas having a robust power supply is second to ideological virtue signaling by republicans

AFAIK there isn't a national power grid in America- there are at least 5 or so State+ size grids, with loads of smaller ones and a whole bunch of interconnects. I'm fairly sure Texas (ERCOT) has interconnects to other grids.

5 grids (of which Texas is one), and they're not even just US ones - we share with Canada: https://i.cbc.ca/1.5921020.1613772812!/fileImage/httpImage/i...

They're then further subdivided into operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...

In February of last year, a winter storm led to Texas having multi-day power outages, exasperated by the fact that ERCOT does not connect to any other grids.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties, the Texas grid has DC ties to the Eastern grid, and similar ties into Mexico.

Strictly speaking - 3 DC ties (from some cursory searching, they seem to only be used for power export) and 1 AC tie, that has only ever been used once. Texas is technically, but not meaningfully, connected to neighboring power grids.

I saw the term used to describe the various interconnected states but I think it's used because federal regulations can apply if one states connects with at least another, hence national

A more robust grid is the solution. But, in the meantime, you can do what I did and put all of my network gear on a battery so it continues to function for about an hour after a power failure. That gives me enough time to wrap up most meetings and start up the generator or head to a cafe, etc if I need more than that.

Bonus, I use Power over Ethernet access points and security cameras in my house, so even my cameras and the wifi access point at the other side of my house still functions perfectly during a power failure. I plan to add an additional battery which should help the system work for up to 4 hours without grid power.

> A well-insulated wall, being necessary for the warmth of a free House, the right of the people to keep and bear R15, shall not be infringed.

We lost our furnace during the winter and it took us about a week to realize it, because the house lost heat so slowly. 3 hours should be nothing unless you've no insulation at all, in which case you have other problems.

Sadly no amount of insulation can keep your internet working.

I'm really disappointed we didn't go for telco-like quality for internet communications.

It would be really nice if all the POPs and DSLAMS and stuff ran on -40v so all you had to do was put your modem and router on a UPS and keep your internet up when the power dropped.

And yet, nobody makes bare-copper ethernet cables...

Depending where you live, a cell phone might work as a reasonable backup, along with a USB battery.

Here’s a funny story: the Uk has the worst insulated homes in Europe and we stopped most of the incentives to improve them in 2010 because “we couldn’t afford it” and now we’re on the hook for billions.

It is basically never cold enough to die of cold in the UK. Winter death "surges" are just death by NHS. Anyway insulation is only worth bothering with if you give up on ventilation (excepting expensive heat-recovery mechanical ventilation very few people have in any country) which is far more important - being a bit chilly is easily fixed with tweed but lack of fresh air really fucks you up. Turn off the heat, open a bloody window and put a jacket on!

I for one am grateful the UK managed to keep loads of nice Victorian townhouses because the Luftwaffe weren't that great at their jobs. They're nice, proper high ceilings and woodwork.

I agree with you that the government energy subsidy we have now is appalling. Should be dumped immediately. I'm paying £15/mo less than I did before - this is the most stupid use of national debt ever devised, I would rather pay what energy actually costs than be forced to be complicit in this.

Wow, this sounds like some exaggerated British stereotype. “You don’t die from it, it’s fine.”

Sadly people with this viewpoint are in government, which is really going to screw over people who live in the real world.

There is nobody with this viewpoint in government. Quite the opposite, the government are running up huge debt subsidising the hell out of people's gas consumption, incentivising them to gobble it, which raises the risk of it running out as mentioned in the linked article. Why do you prefer this? It seems much more disruptive.

Heat recovery ventilation is standard in new construction housing here. Retrofitting decentralized heat recovery ventilation is not that expensive, units starting around €300 with €1000 for the really nice ones. With current gas prices you can earn back the cost of insulation and ventilation changes in less than 5 years.

Ironically, you have to keep rooms quite hot to have anything to recover - and you're committing quite a few kWh to run the ventilators. If your house is new enough to seal properly and you really do want to be hot indoors, it's definitely more economical. Some big "if"s there. But skipping the heat and ventilating naturally is free :-) Can't beat that. It wouldn't be a practical plan in places that regularly get serious cold, but Britain is not one of those places, barring a few Scots mountaintops.

Just to be clear, it's not just "I literally froze to death" thousands of people die in the Uk each year due to the cold, and that was before the cost to heat your home more than doubled. Whilst you appreciate the architecture, the rest of us will appreciate not freezing to death.

Tosh! Thousands more people die in winter, not from cold, probably because they're stupid enough to see NHS doctors. They don't actually die of cold in a country where uninsulated old houses rarely even form ice on the inside of the windows these days. Even that isn't harmful; you should try it, it might make you realise you are much less fragile than you believe. In mentioning the architecture I was merely referencing that Britain having less-insulated houses than some countries is not some moral failing but an historical accident - but if I could trade all modern houses for beautiful ones I would do so in an instant. Even without heating they do not get cold enough in winter to kill you; if you transplanted them to Poland they would, of course, but we don't do that.

I am jealous of the build quality of your house. And/or your mild winter weather.

It really had neither - winter was ending so it wasn't -40 out, but thermal mass is HUUUUGE.

Or at least there are much better built and insulated houses around here now.

In South Africa we've been having load shedding for a record amount of time this year. Worst it's been so far is 2 2hr slots and one 4hr slot every 24 hours (so 8 off per day)

It's not winter though, and we tend not to heat our homes like Europe.

WiFi and fibre boxes are on DC UPSs so working online is OK. Hard to do laundry and run the dishwasher though when power's only on for 4 hours at a time.

Had DC UPSs where I’m from as well, they’re great for wifi and simple lighting.

Maybe a stupid question.

What happens to your freezer items in a country with continous load shedding? Do people just waste that food or are the load shedding periods short enough to avoid thawing?

Freezers are well insulated. As long as nobody opened it up for too long, things stayed good and frozen for 3 to 4 hours without power. However, we have thrown food from the fridge away after 8 or 10 hours power outages, and food from the deep freezer after whole day power outages.

Not great for people hooked up to home medical equipment

Won't medical equipment have back up batteries? (I'm not saying it's a good thing, just not a crisis moment.)

Not in my experience dealing with an oxygen concentrator. The backup was a couple of tanks of O2, which can be used up pretty quick. And the O2 cannister supply chain isn't geared to meet widespread need, as we saw during the first wave of Covid.

You would hope that they have uninteruptable power supplies for anything like that.

I remember when I used a CPAP, I didn't have a UPS. Where I lived, the power was so reliable I just didn't think of it.

After a blackout, I went looking for a UPS. The problem was the alarm. For all the models in the store, I wasn't sure if I could keep the alarm silent, or if the model had an alarm at all.

I never bought a UPS. (I had surgery about 18 months later, and turned in my CPAP.)

Yes, but the grid in Europe is generally so reliable (especially when not living in a rural area), that such stability might be taken for granted.

Luxury. I grew up in a banana republic (California) where one simply cannot expect that kind of reliability.

Power outages can happen for various reasons (storm, accident,...). I would expect the equipment has batteries, no?

Perhaps, but I can only remember personally experiencing a total of three power failures in the UK before I moved out in my mid 30s (and that includes the one time in the converted stables in the middle of nowhere, Wales).

Certainly not by default. And try getting insurance coverage for it.

PSA: If you really are unusually vulnerable to power outages, for example due to using medical equipment or needing to keep medicines in the fridge, see if you qualify for the Priority Services Register:

https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/power-cut/priority-service...

Sometimes there are things the utility companies can do to help those who legitimately need to be prioritised, but only if they know who those people are.

nm I dumb

"plans for" is a funny way of saying blunders into

The UK is speedrunning 1970-1990 here (different underlying causes, obviously)

Things happening in the UK seems to get a lot of attention abroad, probably because we're an English-speaking country, but realistically speaking the more mild of the two scenarios here would likely involve severe power shortages on the European mainland and the more severe of the two a serious global energy crisis. Both of those things are at serious risk of happening this winter, which is why these contingency plans exist.

One thing that this will do is accelerate the move to domestic solar in the UK. With a battery it's pretty viable already, throw in the possibility of 0 power it becomes pretty compelling - if you have the cash.

For me, I could care less whether or not my apt has power for most of the day or night. It's pretty well insulated; even with our wide temp swings (104f peak in the summer, -32f in the winter) it takes a while before it moves either direction. The big conveniences are hot water, washer, dryer, dishwasher of course but if push came to shove, I'd be ok, especially knowing I was given the finger to the Russians.

This certainly isn't an option for every structure, especially free standing older homes built before 2000.

What about your food?

I don't really see this as an issue... potatoes, pasta, etc would be on a stove when power is avail, or I already have a camp stove I could use. Same diet as when I'm in the wilderness.

I think the point you were trying to make is good that spoil wouldn't be available, but that's a small price to pay for not paying for Russia's war.

One of the big problems in the UK is that housing is not built like that. In most of the UK it rarely gets below freezing, yet even new homes come with big gas boilers because of how poorly insulated they are, and if you turn it off for half a day, it will get cold inside.

The housing energy certification in the UK is very misleading, as a home built with walls with a U value of 0.25W/m2K is rated as "very good" (the maximum). Where as in my country all new homes built in the past 5 years have required a U value of less than half that - of course that doesn't tell the full picture as need to know how thick the wall is, but you don't see new UK homes with 1m thick walls. Even with the pretty lax requirements, very few new homes in the UK have an A energy rating.

One major issue is that homes are still built the same way as they were 50 years ago with a cavity wall. Facing bricks are porous, so you need to allow water to escape, and the cavity wall is usually open at the bottom and the top (usually into the attic) to allow that. If you were to wrap the interior wall with a layer of 200mm PIR board and ensure it is air sealed, you could have a pretty well insulated wall, but often the cavity is filled with mineral wool pressed tightly against both walls. Then it inevitably gets moist which impacts the material's thermal performance. And that's just one the most basic things, other modern high performance items such as triple glazing, mechanical ventilation and heat pumps are also rare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_wall

Anyone have a link to the actual report?

Only report I found appears to say that 3-hours downtime a year is an acceptable downtime — unable to find anything about intentional blackouts as a power management strategy.

Just have your mates bring you a few gallons of wind turbine.

…Anarchy in the UK

UK dependent on russian gas ? Who could have thought /s

From the UK Government website:

Unlike other countries in Europe, the UK is in no way dependent on Russian gas supply. Our single largest source of gas is from the UK Continental Shelf and the vast majority of imports come from reliable suppliers such as Norway.

There are no gas pipelines directly linking the UK with Russia and imports from Russia made up less than 4% of total UK gas supply in 2021.

IMHO giving up the 4% of supply that came from Russia is more than worth it to help Ukraine. We should move to increasing the share of renewables we use, from the current 37%, and get rid of foreign energy dependencies once and for all.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/russia-ukraine-and-uk-ene...

It is true that it is not dependent _directly_ on Russian gas, but that is a bit naive.

The UK is highly dependent on Norwegian gas which now has to bid against Germany for, as an example.

I'm totally ignorant of the energy production share by method in the UK, but I was convinced they are pretty much autonomous (to a 95%). Aren't they (you)?

"The UK imports around 50% of its gas from the international market and most homes in England and Wales are heated by mains gas supply. Gas is also used to fuel around a third of the UK's electricity generation, so rising gas prices will usually lead to rising electricity prices.

Norway is typically the UK's largest gas supplier. In 2021, the UK imported £14.5 billion of gas from Norway, which accounted for 77% of all gas imports (Figure 3). Other countries the UK imports gas from include Qatar, the United States and Russia. Almost half of the UK's gas exports in 2021 were to Ireland (47.2%), and the Netherlands was also a large export partner (28.2%)."

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay...

Although the UK has some advantages e.g. an appreciable percentage of Europe's LNG capacity, pipeline infrastructure to Norway, and pre-existing contracts with suppliers from Kuwait and the US.

From the article itself:

> It blamed the international scramble for supplies because of the war, which has starved continental Europe of its main source of natural gas.

Which is political-ese for "sanctions".

The UK does not plan for anything. This is just someone pointing out what will happen, there is no program to get extra supply online or shed some load or make sure people with medical equipment can still get power. Quite the opposite, we're spending more than we spend on education to discourage people from using less...

To be honest, that isn't the case. I run a start-up in crisis management and there's a lot of planning being done across the public and private sectors — it's just that those most senior in Government won't listen.

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